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    Unearthing Career Truths: What “Wuthering Heights” Teaches Us About Our Professional Journeys

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    Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a tempestuous tale of love, loss, and social class, might seem an unlikely source of career wisdom. Yet, beneath the bleak moors and tragic romance, lie potent lessons that can illuminate our own professional paths and job searches. Far from the polished boardrooms and LinkedIn profiles of today, the characters of Wuthering Heights navigate ambition, class structures, and personal fulfillment in ways that echo strikingly in our modern working lives.
    The Perils of Passion Without Purpose: The Heathcliff Syndrome
    At the heart of Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff, a character driven by an overwhelming, all-consuming passion. Initially an outcast, he returns years later as a wealthy gentleman, having mysteriously acquired his fortune. While his drive is undeniable, his ambition is solely fueled by revenge and a desire to reclaim what he believes was taken from him.
    Career Lesson: Passion is undeniably crucial for a fulfilling career. However, if that passion lacks a broader purpose beyond personal gain or settling old scores, it can become destructive. Heathcliff’s intense focus, while leading to material success, ultimately brings him no joy and destroys those around him. In our careers, this translates to the danger of pursuing a role or industry simply for the prestige or the paycheck, without a genuine interest in the work itself or its impact. Without a deeper “why,” even a high-flying career can leave us feeling hollow and unfulfilled. Consider what truly drives you beyond the immediate gratification, and how your work contributes to something larger than yourself.
    Navigating Social Ladders: The Earnshaws and Lintons
    The novel meticulously details the rigid social hierarchy of 19th-century England, exemplified by the contrasting fortunes of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. The Earnshaws, once masters of Wuthering Heights, fall into decline, while the refined Lintons represent established wealth and status. Characters like Catherine and Heathcliff struggle against these societal confines, making choices that have profound professional and personal repercussions.
    Career Lesson: While overt class distinctions may be less rigid today, unspoken social and professional ladders still exist. Networking, personal branding, and understanding company culture are modern equivalents of navigating these social structures. Just as Catherine felt she couldn’t marry Heathcliff without compromising her social standing, we sometimes make career decisions based on perceived status rather than genuine fit or passion. The novel reminds us to be aware of these forces but also to critically evaluate whether they align with our own values and long-term goals. Sometimes, a “step down” in perceived status can be a significant step up in personal growth and job satisfaction. For more on this, check out our guide on how to choose the right company culture for you.
    The Importance of Adaptability and Self-Improvement: Isabella’s Transformation
    Isabella Linton, initially a naive and somewhat superficial character, undergoes a remarkable transformation after her disastrous marriage to Heathcliff. Forced to flee and survive independently, she develops resilience and strength previously unimaginable. She adapts to harsh circumstances and raises her son with dignity, far from the toxic environment of Wuthering Heights.
    Career Lesson: The professional landscape is constantly evolving, and adaptability is a non-negotiable skill. Isabella’s journey underscores the power of learning from difficult experiences and developing new strengths. In our own careers, this means embracing continuous learning, being open to new challenges, and not being afraid to pivot when circumstances demand it. It’s about seeing setbacks not as failures, but as opportunities for growth and skill development. Just as Isabella found her inner fortitude, we can cultivate resilience to navigate career changes and challenges. Learn more about navigating career transitions in our article on how to bounce back from career setbacks.
    In conclusion, while the windswept moors of Wuthering Heights might seem a world away from the contemporary office, Brontë’s timeless narrative offers surprisingly relevant insights into the complexities of ambition, social mobility, and the pursuit of a fulfilling professional life. By reflecting on the fates of its characters, we can gain a deeper understanding of our own career choices and job search strategies.
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      in Talent Acquisition

      Owning Every Moment of Your Hiring Experience

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      Companies often believe candidate experience begins and ends with the job application on your website. It definitely does include the job app, but there’s so much more to the hiring experience that deserves close attention.
      To create an overall amazing hiring experience, you first have to define its wider boundaries. The experience starts when people become aware that your organization exists; in other words, it’s your brand. It’s how you show up in the world, what you say on relevant current events, and how you portray life at your company through pictures, videos, words, and anywhere your brand is present online. The next touchpoint is when candidates apply for a job and hear (or don’t hear) from you with an enthusiastic, transparent and timely follow-up. Then hopefully they get an interview, then an offer and they accept.
      But it doesn’t stop there. The candidate experience extends beyond accepting their role to the first day on the job, and even through their onboarding period. There are easily dozens of touchpoints in the candidate experience, whether organizations realize them or not. That means dozens of opportunities to impress or fall short of expectations in the eyes of the people who are going to help you achieve your business goals. A negative or inconsistent candidate experience can damage your brand’s reputation and your ability to hire and retain the right people you need.
      Here’s some much-needed guidance on how to think about and shape candidate experiences to make them as meaningful and beneficial as possible, both for candidates and for everyone involved in the hiring process in the company.
      You no longer directly control your reputation
      The days when companies controlled what information was released about them are long gone. Today, in the time it takes to eat a ham sandwich, a person can get a full data dump about your company from Glassdoor and corroborate that information with other social media and connections on LinkedIn.
      Mathematically, most applicants and candidates for your jobs will never get an offer from you. However, many won’t hesitate to describe the experience, no matter how far they got in it, on Glassdoor and on very public social media channels. And these channels will help inform the decision of the next star candidate that you so badly want and need to hire.
      You’re no longer in control—at least not in the same way as 10 or 15 years ago. The only way you can be in control of your employer brand now is to think about the hiring experience and make it so good at every step that perfect strangers will interview with you and write you glowing reviews, even if they don’t get the job.
      What are you posting?
      Many organizations do not make a clear distinction between three documents:

      A job description is the internal document which outlines the responsibilities, requirements, expectations, pay and so forth;
      A job post lists the open role on an organization’s website, with enough information and enticement to appeal to talented people so they decide to submit their information; and
      A job ad is a placement on an external site like Indeed or ZipRecruiter, meant to get people to click through and apply.

      Don’t post your job description. It’s usually paragraph after paragraph of dense, bullet-point language and meaningless jargon. Instead, create job posts and ads that are customized and tailored for specific audiences that actually aim to attract great talent and give a real feel for what taking on this role entails.
      What are you mapping?
      Have you mapped every impression and interaction of your candidate experience? If not, you should. Mapping all your interactions with prospects during the hiring process will help you understand where you can improve and how you can stand out from competitors. A few areas to consider:

      Emails that go from your organization to applicants
      Which employees are contacting an applicant and coordinating an interview
      Creating useful materials to provide candidates before they interview (from employee profile blogs to brand videos to company milestone timelines)
      Understanding how to correctly pronounce a candidate’s name
      For in-person interviews – who will greet the candidate; where will the interview happen; is the candidate left alone in a room; is a beverage offered
      During any interview, regardless of stage – is there an agenda; does the candidate get a chance to ask questions; will someone share what next steps with the candidate without being asked
      After the interview – how do you provide updates on timing and follow-up interviews; how do you inform candidates you won’t be progressing with them.

      Have you asked how you’re doing?
      While mapping out every interaction will help give you think about the candidate’s experience from their perspective, you won’t actually know how well you’ve executed unless you ask them.
      Sure you should monitor Glassdoor, but it’s often the case that only a small (yet loud) percentage of all candidates will leave a review. Forward-thinking companies gather useful information through candidate surveys in addition to monitoring Glassdoor and other similar sites. We’ve found that around 20 percent of the surveys get filled out — giving us more data than what we’d gain with Glassdoor. These surveys should go to both candidates who received an offer and those who didn’t get the job.
      Having a consistent flow of feedback and information will help you continuously refine and improve your hiring process.
      Onboarding
      Many companies think of new hire onboarding as the logistics of getting people a desk and a computer, with a side of paperwork to sign and documentation to complete. While that’s partly true, a new hire’s onboarding experience should include a whole lot more.
      Onboarding should be about how a candidate becomes part of the community as an employee. It should include opportunities and information to help them learn the real culture and philosophy of the company. During the interview phase, we may have established that a candidate will be able to do a particular job. During the onboarding phase, we show that person how to do that job, and how to begin to navigate the company teams, processes, and culture.
      You have the ability to transform onboarding from a boring bureaucratic function into a customized experience that will blow away new hires and compel them to want to tell everyone about how you gave them the red-carpet treatment.
      Add to that the efforts you make to improve the hiring experience in general, and not only are you likely to have increased the Employee Lifetime Value of this person, but you may well have your newest, enthusiastic referral source.
      Take ownership of the hiring experience
      By owning every moment of your hiring experience – from job post to onboarding – you are making the process easier and more productive for both candidates and your organization.
      The experience of applying for a job shapes how candidates form their impressions of your brand. Unless you’re a company like Google or Facebook, and maybe even then, most people don’t know what it’s like to work for you. If your hiring team is disorganized or unprofessional, that’s how the candidate will perceive your entire company.
      By taking ownership of the process to ensure a candidate has a good experience, you can improve your ‘talent brand’ and make it easier to hire great candidates who are excited to work with you.
      By Jon Stross, Co-Founder and President of Greenhouse Software, and Co-Author of TALENT MAKERS: How the Best Organizations Win Through Structured and Inclusive Hiring.
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      in Workplace

      Fresh Perspectives for Post-Pandemic Working

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      Forecasting like the weather is fraught with difficulty, but at least the Met Office has decades of data, advanced modeling technology all combined with huge experience. Forecasting the future of work, how people will work, and what the workplace will look like – in the context of a global pandemic – is completely unprecedented. A bit like trying to foresee a hurricane making landfall at Hastings.
      Certainly, offices will not die nor disappear, but the experience of the past few months has seen a huge behavioral change, particularly during the hard lockdown. The proven viability of working remotely at scale means the way we work and the way we use offices needs to adapt.  But, before jumping into solutions-mode, we should recognize technology-driven change was already in train. Over the last decade, it has resulted in a massive shift from fixed to fluid. Covid-19 has added fuel to the fire. It is the single greatest change accelerator in the world of work, and the domain of real estate, for more than 100 years.
      To help readers of Undercover Recruiter gain some fresh perspectives; I suggest that the following thoughts may help re-shape your views on work, the workforce, and the workplace. They are all premised on my core belief that whatever emerges post-COVID-19 it will be much more people-centric than ever before.
      1. There may not be ‘a new normal’.
      A reservoir of printer’s ink has been expended on the discourse of returning to work and getting back to a new normal. I wonder are we looking at this through blinkers? The winds of massive change in terms of how we work were already starting to gust before the pandemic. Working away from the office has severely dented the Principle of Presenteeism, the last bastion of traditional management; which strengthens these winds to gale force. I believe we are facing a new reality which calls for a lot of fresh thinking about how we do things.
      2. Are we seeing only part of the picture in the current debate about the merits of office versus home/remote working?
      In recent months the bi-polar debate of working from home versus a return to the office has attracted a host of media commentary. Yet I suggest that this debate is only part of the picture. The pandemic enforced experiment of working beyond the confines of the traditional office demonstrates that we now have a real choice about where and when we work.  It has also raised many other questions.
      3. Can we move away from our fixation on the physical aspect of work and see the wood for the trees.
      Whilst there is much to commend the office in terms of collaboration, creativity, and the social aspects of how we work, we do need to revisit its overall purpose. The key question in my mind is the fixed nature of the pre-pandemic system – everything revolved around a fixed physical place with four walls. What about the potential of multiple workplace dimensions rather than the traditional either/or choice – the office or work from home?  Can we think about alternative ways of how we carry out office-type work today?
      4. Now is the time to shift to outcomes-focused work.
      Surely, we can all recognize the benefits to be derived from alternative working practices which, in themselves, can produce meaningful outcomes and measurable impact – irrespective of the physical space where people are working.
      5. Do we need to join the dots?
      The propensity for silo thinking and ‘protecting our own turf’ prevails in lots of organizations. Has the time arrived to break down these barriers?  In the interest of coming up with a more sustainable and sensible view of the convergence of work, the workforce, and the workplace.
      6. Necessity is the mother of all invention.
      We have all been forced to change in 2020, and I wonder could we discover new or different ways of doing things?  The nature of work and how we use both spaces and places have been fundamentally affected by the crisis and a return to the old world is unlikely.  By using this time to think and reflect, could we invent some fresh thinking about workplaces, work, and the workforce?
      Our world is changing, work is changing; therefore, the built environment needs to adjust. Now is the time to re-set, re-assess and re-imagine.  But it will be much wider than just buildings as I said at the start, it will all be about the talent and their new-found choice.  I think we are seeing not an era of change, but the change of an era.
      Where is My Office?: Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century by Chris Kane, in collaboration with Eugenia Anastassiou, is published by Bloomsbury Business on 15 October 2020. Available at Bloomsbury.com and at all good bookshops.

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      in Workplace

      Create a Sense of Belonging Within Your Organization

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      Belonging is a feeling. None of us wants to participate in communities where we don’t feel good, welcome, or appreciated. We certainly won’t invest our full effort unless—and until—we’re vested in this manner. Of course, what makes us feel welcomed differs from person to person.
      When possible, people leave places where they don’t feel belonging. They proactively move to where they do feel it. At the end of the day, any thriving organization wants to create a feeling of belonging among its employees. Otherwise, you’ll never get the best from your team members.
      What creates belonging?
      Research indicates that belonging shows up when we experience two feelings:
      Feeling valued (or needed) by the entire group or some part of it.
      Feeling that we’re a fit for what’s needed in the community and the environment that’s been created.
      Reflecting on the past 20 years of research and practitioners’ experience, we say that the feeling of belonging usually arises when participants experience some of the following feelings, at some level:
      Accepted
      Welcomed
      Valued
      Cared for
      Appreciated
      Possessing insider understanding
      How can we create these feelings?
      To produce these feelings, a community must provide an experience in which participants can notice they are accepted, welcomed, valued, cared for, appreciated, or in possession of insider understanding.
      Successful leaders generate positive feelings in their employees and colleagues. Though this can seem like a magical task to some, after you’ve learned the principles that make communities work, it will sound more achievable. To start:
      Understand it’s a first-person experience. As a feeling, belonging is experienced internally as a first-person experience. These experiences are difficult for a third-person observer to measure, but that difficulty makes the experience no less critical.
      Many first-person experiences, particularly those that are important in relationships (and the world), don’t lend themselves to quantified measuring, such as a mother’s love or the trust in your neighbor. Measuring belonging is similar to measuring a mother’s love.
      Promote the “inside view.” You can magnify a sense of belonging by helping community members share insider understanding, which simply means sharing things insiders understand that outsiders do not or cannot.
      Here’s an example: Melissa Allen is a retired firefighter captain. She shared how much she appreciates spending time among other firefighters in her community because they understand the complexity, pressure, and passion that often comes with the role. The firefighters share a never-spoken understanding and compassion for one another. This is so strong that Melissa notices that if a firefighter’s spouse joins the group, the conversation changes. This isn’t because spouses aren’t welcome or loved. It’s because they never share the insider understanding that career firefighters gain.
      Usually, when we seek out people who have shared an experience similar to our own (fighting cancer, living overseas, running a marathon), we’re searching for this shared insider understanding.
      When an organization embraces the principles of building community, employees are drawn in because they share some values more intensely than do outsiders. We want to feel understood by the people who share our values. We want to see that the people inside understand this more than the people outside of our community.
      Be selective. By the way, this is one reason why a community can’t succeed if it accepts anyone, anytime, with any values. So be careful to recruit people who not only embrace your organization’s core values but also fit with your culture.
      Charles H. Vogl is an award-winning author, speaker, and executive adviser. Carrie Melissa Jones is the founder of Gather Community Consulting. Their new book is Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging. Learn more at buildingbrandcommunities.com.

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